Is gender 100% bullshit? Or not

[speakingwoman]

Big question!

So, biology is a stable reality (I have been reading the well-written Hands Across the Aisle site)

Some bits of biology are visible and tangible e.g. our wider hips.

That changes some behaviours (our gait is different to men’s gaits).

And our hormone mix is different.

Where does biology stop and gender start?

@mooncuplanding women's nurturing skills could be entirely culturally instilled.

Fun fact! Early humans ground a lot grain to eat, and as result women's physique was akin To that of a modern Olympic rower. There was an excellent recent study looking at arm bone density. In fact, it took until medieval times for the female upper arm to get its modern slender shape.

Just imagine living in a time when women were built like rowers! that's a society where men think twice before committing sexual assault.

The basis for ideas of gendered Hunter/ gatherer division in early humans is poor, and really based on modern gender biases. We just don't know. It's just as likely that early women who were adept at hunting hunted, and that early men who liked kids did a lot of childcare.

What about sexual behaviour?

Do you think there is a gendered difference between the sexual behaviour of men and women based on biology, or is it simply due to culture and socialisation?

Well we’re innies rather than outies....

At no point have I said culture doesn’t play a part

But it is not the whole picture, imo

I don't believe gender is a wholly social construct. Most of it is, skirts, football, pink all that stuff. But generally speaking there are some behaviours and traits that are more commonly associated with the one sex. Of course not all people fit in the boxes and not fitting in the box would not make you abnormal in any way. Examples of these gendered behaviours would be, men tend to be less empathetic, more physically aggressive, more sexually motivated/higher sex drives, bigger risk takers, less aware of danger. Women, more empathetic, natural parents, cleaner, more alert to danger.

If woman and men in general terms don't have some gendered differences, why don't we see the same number of female psychopaths? It could be because there aren't as many, which supports a "female" brain surely, or because female psychopaths behave in a different way stopping them being identified, again showing a behavioural difference between men and women in general.

But of course these are very general terms and as said not fitting the box doesn't mean your trapped in the wrong body of abnormal or ill.

alldayinbed Now you're blowing my mind. Please no one tell me that isn't true. I love it.

If female nurturing skills were not based in any biology, I believe we would not be here right now, we would have become extinct a long time ago

I wonder why we don’t want to value this immensely valuable female behaviour

All day.. yes the more we think about people as human individuals the better.

However when we can identify a discriminatory trend against eg women or disabled people then it is useful to categorise people in order to counteract the discrimination .Ignoring the fact that weaker people suffer discrimination and focussing only on each individual case will not lead to changes. It's missing the bigger picture. the root cause.

It's also useful medically to identify men and women because we can make some pretty useful generalisations about diagnosis and treatment based on the sex of someone.

There was a really interesting thread a while back around class based analysis

Radardetector I'm not sure you've understand the meaning of social construct.

mooncuplanding If female nurturing skills were not based in any biology, I believe we would not be here right now, we would have become extinct a long time ago

Unless men are also naturally nurturing to their offspring of course...

Men nurture yes, but I really think you are denying the biological reality (and burden) that women exist with

There wasn’t formula 100 years ago

And we can’t wipe out that massive stretch of evolutionary biological development in a second

Except that we don't know whether the evolutionary echo of that nurturing gets passed on from brain to brain. Or if each woman learns anew to nurture. For example I can observe no difference in nurturing traits between my male and female children. If my ds has a child of his own and not my dd I wonder which will continue to develop their nurturing skills more.

There are changes to the brain during pregnancy that have an impact on nurturing response.

Although surely anyone, male or female, who has no nurturing response to a newborn baby has a serious psychological impairment.

@speakingwoman fascinating question- I don't see why it matters...
I'm female, and I have given birth. I've breastfed. I've been a stay home Mum.

Anecdotal evidence is not data.

Ops question weighed heavily on me for years, especially with its implications around Trans issues (don't want to derail thread here). And so I did a LOT of reading and have come out the other side feeling that if you assume more similarity than divergence between the sexes people and life make a lot more sense.

And really, the science is quite clear. Some divergence, a lot of it fairly superficial (some anatomical difference- remember all fetuses start female, sexual organs are equivalent- ie clitorus and penis are corresponding organ), brains show very little divergence. It's somewhat like racial divergence. People with more Chinese genetic material are likely to be smaller- people with African material darker skin. People on a western diet are more likely to be big... doesn't mean any of them are innately better at parenting.

Re testosterone. It's about sensitivity. Let's say my husband makes loads but his receptors are few. Let's say I make a little but have great receptors. The net effect is he will display fewer traits associated with T, and I will display more. I still have female sex organs- he still has his trouser snake, but in many ways I would conform to a more male set of behaviours and he may be more nuturing.

Post menopausal women often have far more testosterone than their husbands. It's a good explanation for why often men of that age want to nest while the women want to explore. The point is, biological sex changes with age, external factors such as diet and environment and so on.

Yes hormones carry innate behavioural instructions, but the thing you have in your pants doesn't necessarily tell you how those hormones work for you in your particular body.

However, society looks at what you have in your pants and tells you every day from birth how you should think, feel, behave without taking into account the fact that your junk isn't the whole story.

@SarahCarer

Why?

alldayinbed I'm not sure you've travelled as far as you think though. You seem to have gone from thinking it's your genitals that tell you how to think to thinking it's your hormones. What about reason? What about repetitive thought patterns, the things we invest our brains into? What about exposure to art and culture? And what about language and socialisation?

Radardetector By it's very definition if a particular sex role is socially constructed (and therefore reinforced) you will see it repeated widely across that sex. You seem to be using the widespread presence of sex based norms / stereotypical behaviours as evidence that they're socially constructed. A similar example would be if I pointed out that people under the age of 30 must be naturally much more adept with their thumbs and that this is a skill people lose after the age of 30. It must be a natural aptitude since it is so widespread. Ignoring the impact of smart phones altogether.

You seem to be using the widespread presence of sex based norms / stereotypical behaviours as evidence that they're socially constructed. Sorry what I meant to say was "You seem to be using the widespread presence of sex based norms / stereotypical behaviours as evidence that they're based in biology"

in a mega speedy skim ( my eyes are tired) that's observational studies which of course are bounded by the diversity in society and culture that are available to be measured.

There are no observations from a society where there were no differences in how women and men were treated in anything, women are always very aware that they are weaker. Could that awareness in itself make women behave differently...probably yes.

Is that biology or culture? It is biology that women are weaker. It is biology that weakness is exploited. A form of Darwin. but the end result is not biologically encoded as at birth far as I know. It's still appears to be some kind of learned behaviour.... culture.

It's pretty hard to imagine any way of proving some things either way ( ethically at least)

it doesn't reduce the point that caring for people is undervalued in our society today because it's seen as women's work. But assuming that women are naturally better at caring is a generalisation that is not proven and I don't see any benefit form promoting am unproven generalisation . I can see negatives though...discouraging boys who are caring from following their natural instincts, making women who are less caring feel bad about themselves, and making it easy to keep the wages low for caring jobs...because it's only women and it comes easy to them

But I am too tired to make any sense anymore.

@SarahCarer

I don't beleive that male aggression is a social construct, I think it is a sex based characteristic.

We can see the same aggressive behaviour in other mammals. I think women being more empathic, cleaner and alert to danger are sex based characteristics there to help us care for our young. Again we can see the same behavior in the animal kingdom.

I think there might be fuzzy bits around hormones. Isn’t there a link between higher testosterone and propensity to violence?
There's a strong correlation between the warrior gene and violence, the original study was of a Dutch family in which all the menfolk were violent. It's a bit toxic to discuss now because although the correlation was strong and subsequently replicated, the gene isn't evenly spread amongst all demographic groups. It's a shame because something like genetic analysis and early intervention would actually prevent so much violence. The gene basically predicts a violent reaction to any provocation, rather than random violence. So identifying who might be prone to reacting violently and focussing on them could have been really useful.

@SarahCarer oh yeah! All that too! That's why you can't boil it down to 'oh he has a willy that's why he's violent' or 'she has a lot of oestrogen that's why she's a good mum'. I was only making the point about hormones as one part of the rich tapestry that makes us 'male' or 'female'.

But yeah always so much to learn and maybe some new discoveries will overturn everything we think we know about this stuff.

If you’re good at something, you tend to be increasingly thrust into that role. If you breastfeed, you become skilled at caring for a young person. So you’re better at feeding, so you get to do it, or chosen to do it. Let her get on with it while I go out and hunt boar. And so on, through generations. Easy to see how this becomes gendered, and then that role gets thrust onto the whole class of people like you (formerly known as women).

Let’s jusr say that it is biological that women like nurturing^

Why? It's not true. You may have been socialised to think this but there is no reason to presume that.

I agree. I lurk in some weird places online, and MRAs/incels etc are quick to throw out the accusation that mothers are just as likely to be violent as fathers. link
It's not NAMALT, it's the opposite. I don't feel I can be taken seriously as a woman if I cling to the notion that all women are morally superior.

Plus, plus - I don't know where this comes from but anyone who's ever engaged in online debate with a bepenised person will know how important it is for them to win. It's not about exchanging ideas or learning or anything but gotcha. It's a total obsession with status to the exclusion of things I'd (as a mere female) regard as more important, like sharing information and increasing understanding.